31Jan 2009

A grown-up Saturday

I may be an adult, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that I’m grown-up.  After all, one of my favourite phrases goes something along the lines of “you’re only young once, but you can be immature forever”.  Our fancy dress parties are testament to that overwhelming tendency to revert to a child at any available opportunity.  With that in mind, today’s activities are quite out of the ordinary for me.  I’ve spent the day doing ‘Saturday’ things.

This morning I went to do the weekly food shop at Tesco, but on the way I stopped in at B&Q – that’s when I first noticed things were different.  After all, B&Q is not a child’s playground.  It’s more of a grown man’s playground, full of power tools, electrical items, things that need assembly, all manner of things that most people don’t recognise and wouldn’t know what to do with, and generally a lot of stuff that makes you feel more like a man.  I went in to buy a pack of staples (no, not for a stapler) for hammering into our decking (more on that in a moment), and ended up coming out with a wireless doorbell and a keyring torch as well.

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23Jan 2009

First friend found

I’m not usually one for following popular trends (I think I was emotionally scarred by the day Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles went out of fashion on the very day I proudly brought my action figure into school).  Facebook has been one of the exceptions, in that not only did I sign up fairly soon after it became big enough to catch my eye but I’m actually still a regular user of their services.  I have photos uploaded there, I use it to keep track of my friends, and I have no reason to stop any time soon.

I did however succumb to a Facebook-related trend that is probably beginning to grow old now – I uploaded a profile photo of me as a baby.  Well, about three years old anyway.  I even got a comment left by a friend of mine saying how cute I was.  And it got me thinking – who actually remembers me from when I was that age?  No one I’m in contact with now, apart from family of course.  The only people who would remember me from then would be my old friends from my first primary school, but I’ve not been in touch with any of them since… well, since I left in Year 3.

And this is where Facebook really comes into its own – a quick search brought up an unexpected surprise, finding someone who is potentially the first friend I ever made.

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15Jan 2009

Turning on the heat

This afternoon we had a nice man come to fix our heating.  He’s been round before to fix our central heating system actually, and from what he said today the two may well be connected.  The first time he came round because the water pump was making a horrible noise, as if it was running dry.  When he inspected it he saw that it was indeed dry, and the water system wasn’t refilling itself from the tank in the loft.  Turns out the pipe had become clogged up with gunk, and it took a lot of prodding to shift the blockage.

Today he came round again, this time to solve the problem of the heatless radiators.  Two of the radiators in our house have been cold for some time now, the one in the kitchen and the one in the study.  I bled them both before Christmas, and the thermostats were turned up full, but they just weren’t getting any hot water to them at all.  So not a problem with the radiators themselves, but rather an issue somewhere else in the system.  And Mr Plumber confirmed my suspicions.

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4Jan 2009

The joys of the tube

youtube_logoI don’t usually do this, but this post is primarily concerned with linking to cool stuff I’ve found elsewhere on the web.  Not very original on my behalf, so be thankful that this doesn’t happen often.  However, they are things I thought it would be fun to share, simply because I enjoyed them.  All of them are videos on YouTube, and both were ‘featured’ items today, which is how I stumbled across them – testament that featuring items does actually work sometimes.

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